Installation and provisioning of network equipment, such as optical systems, is a complicated task, requiring expertise on behalf of installation personnel. Optical networking equipment is typically designed to be very flexible, allowing support for many different types of topologies and configurations by the same fundamental pieces of equipment. While this helps make the systems flexible in many different problem spaces, it also creates complexity with respect to provisioning and installing systems. As such, typical telecom installers develop expertise to deal with provisioning and installing systems.
For network equipment, systems typically include multiple cards, modules, blades, etc. (“cards”) acting together, deployed in one or more chassis which group or couple cards together via a common backplane. All cards inserted into the chassis can be automatically organized and grouped together in a function based on the physical presence of the cards in the chassis. When more than one chassis is deployed to serve a function, the chassis are normally associated together by way of user provisioning actions during installation. In many cases, this involves provisioning of communication interfaces, to allow separate chassis to communicate, and then other information which allows the chassis to determine they are part of the same group.
In particular, systems without a physical backplane, i.e., the independent cards or other devices in a cluster, which are preferred for their modularity, lack a central management focus to organize the equipment and relate the equipment together based on the physical chassis the equipment is a part of Normally the equipment needs to be manually configured to enforce this relationship and to allow the equipment to function as one entity in the cluster. For systems which include independent cards acting together, they may be physically connected into a common card used for a management interface and grouping function. This adds additional cost to the system as a “cluster controller” is needed to organize and manage the groups of cards. This also affects scalability and size of the cluster, since all cards must be physically connected to the same device. As described herein, independent cards can include “pizza boxes,” integrated rack unit devices, or the like, i.e., systems without a backplane.
Other implementations for independent cards may have the cards connected as peers into a common communications infrastructure, or connected together in a common subnetwork. Even when the cards can be associated due to their presence in a common communications subnetwork, provisioning of the common cluster information and associating the cards together so they can perform test functions as a group requires some level of communication provisioning and cluster provisioning. Associating cards together requires additional hardware to enforce that association (e.g., backplane, cluster controller, etc.), or additional provisioning to make that association explicit (e.g., user provisioning). Additional hardware used to enforce the association adds additional cost to the network, as well as a single point of failure for the common management structure. Provisioning the association is time consuming, error prone, vendor specific, and labor intensive.
Thus, in typical telecommunication deployments, expertise is required on behalf of installation personnel. However, optical systems and other native telecommunications systems are moving into the data center, i.e., there is a merging of telecommunication and data-communication systems. For example, an optical system for data center interconnectivity can include multiple “pizza boxes” in a rack which requires cabling to a photonic shelf. The conventional approach to provisioning and configuration of such a system is error prone and time consuming, especially for data center personnel who typically have different expertise from telecom installers. The conventional approach requires manual provisioning steps for cabling, for explicitly setting wavelength values (for tunable transceivers), etc. It is possible for an administrator or installer to incorrectly choose a wavelength that is already in use unless the configuration has been properly tracked. Alternatively, a network wide management system would need to communicate with all the devices at the same time in order to determine proper wavelength assignments to avoid collisions or contention.
In view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide automatic configuration of an optical system based on physical deployment, especially in the context of a data center or low-cost system deployment.